You don't need to already have Max on your computer. The Max runtime is part of the standalone.

I'm gonna have to look into some way to let the user change audio drivers without making them have to get a full copy of Max. I'll keep everyone posted.

epic

Thanks for informing me about this issue. I might just need to recompile it with the latest version of Max/MSP for Windows. I'll try to get this done as soon as I get access to a Windows computer.

Okay, I've recompiled with the latest version of Max. Let me know if that works!

According to the Cycling 74 website, "ad_mme: stopping due to error" is an audio device driver issue, and they say the fix is to update the drivers for your sound card. Do let me know how that goes though, if there's anything that I can do on my end I'll try to fix it up, but this seems like it's an issue with Max/MSP in general.

Hey! Sorry that I haven't been so active with this project lately, been super busy with my grocery day job. Really appreciate the input, though.

I like your ideas. My original intent for this program was to make something that sort of blurred the line between music creation software and a musical composition in and of itself (in the same sort of spirit as John Cage's radio pieces) so I didn't put in a LOT of granular control, but the "change" button wouldn't be too hard to implement at all. Same with the crossfade, I'm not sure why I didn't add that in at the start. I GUESS you could make the argument that the glitchy loop clicks are part of the ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ, but at the same time it wouldn't hurt to have that as a parameter that can be dialed in to taste.

I wasn't even aware that the program was accessing the mic. That's probably a quirk of the Max/MSP engine it runs in, I'll see if there's any way to disable it within the patch.

I'll have to do some thinking about the "normalize each loop" part. Normalizing the input audio itself shouldn't be too hard, but every loop in the program is just a randomly selected chunk of that single audio buffer. It might be worth putting a compressor at the end of the signal chain?

I totally agree that the buttons SHOULD be lit up when active, I just didn't know how to really do that in Max? I'll have to see if there's a way to make a button object behave like a "toggle" (i.e. an on/off switch) instead of a "bang" (a triggered pulse).

As for the higher sample rate, if the input audio's sample rate is higher Max SHOULD be able to just automatically deal with it. I think the output is 44.1kHz by default, so a lot of the "crunchy" artifacts you hear are just the result of playing a 44.1kHz input file at a slower sample rate. If the input audio has a higher sample rate than that, you SHOULD hear less artifacts when slowing it down. Then again, I know that a lot of audio people work at 48kHz, but again, if the input audio is still at 44.1kHz, making the output sample rate 48kHz isn't going to do anything but make the output file bigger than it needs to be.

The MIDI settings are totally irrelevant, they're just there because Max/MSP takes MIDI input, and exporting a Max patch as an executable really just means wrapping the Max/MSP engine itself. That's why if you explore the files of the executable, you'll find a bunch of assets that aren't used (these come stock with Max). That said, I probably should have done some "optimization" involving deleting any unneeded assets from the executable, that would quite likely cut down the file size significantly. As for the MIDI...well...we'll see if I can think of any ideas for that. ;)

It could be related to having multiple audio outputs/drivers? Vaporgene uses the Max runtime and maybe it's pointed itself at a different audio driver, like ASIO or something. I don't currently have much of a way to check right now as my Windows machine is currently out of commission, but see if going into system audio settings and making sure that the computer speakers are the default helps at all.